Topeka ? A Lawrence man convicted on drug charges will get a new hearing after the Kansas Supreme Court on Friday overturned his conviction and sentence.

Casey Baker was arrested in June 2013 when police, who recognized him and knew he had outstanding warrants, saw him riding a bicycle wearing a blue drawstring backpack.

According to the court’s opinion, Detective Mike McAtee and Officer Kim Nicholson caught up with Baker at the Habitat for Humanity store on the 700 block of Connecticut where they found him inside wearing the same backpack.

When they approached him, Baker reportedly dropped the backpack. McAtee then arrested Baker on the outstanding warrants and told another officer to search the backpack. Inside, they found needles inside a Nintendo game case and crystal methamphetamine inside a cell phone carrier.

At trial, Baker’s attorney moved to exclude the evidence from the backpack, arguing it was obtained without a search warrant. But Judge Paula Martin denied the motion, saying the evidence would have been discovered inevitably through an inventory search when the backpack was booked into a property locker.

During a hearing on that motion, however, a Lawrence police officer and a Douglas County correctional officer both testified that in such cases, they would have taken the backpack into a property locker but would not necessarily have searched its contents.

In an opinion written by Justice Caleb Stegall, the court said it might be reasonable to assume they would have inventoried the contents, but not that they would have opened the Nintendo game case or the cell phone carrier because neither the police department nor the jail had standardized procedures governing such cases.

“Consequently, we hold the State did not prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the contraband would have been inevitably discovered through a valid inventory search of Baker’s backpack,” Stegall wrote.

The court reversed Baker’s conviction and remanded the case back to Douglas County District Court to be reconsidered in light of the ruling.